Shot All to Hell

by Mark Lee Gardner

  Jesse did not quote the classics like his brother, but instead liked to boast of his own exploits. “He liked some reckless expedition, and was a wonderful horseman,” stated Jesse’s brother-in-law, Thomas Mimms. He loved to read the newspapers. And he had a flare for letter writing. “He would dash off a letter without pausing once,” said Mimms, “and would never read it over.” Frank, on the other hand, “never wrote a letter and did not unnecessarily expose himself.”

  Jesse was said to be liberal with the other gang members, whereas Frank could be stingy. But while Jesse was more excitable than his brother, he was no less fearless. “If you hear they’ve captured me alive,” Jesse once said to a cousin, “say it’s a lie; they may kill me, but they will never get me otherwise.”

  Strangely, Jesse believed in the supernatural. Charley Ford described a late-night incident where a “ball of fire” (probably ball lightning) rolled across the road and underneath the horses he and Jesse were riding. Ford had never seen anything like this, and it frightened him. But Jesse told Ford he had been visited by these “balls” before, and each incident was followed by “serious trouble.” They were meant to be warnings, he said, and he took them seriously. A Liberty newspaper editor perhaps summed up the outlaw best when he said, “Jesse James was a queer combination.”

  Perhaps so, but the man was so unquestionably charismatic it made sense for him to assert himself as the gang’s leader. But Jesse was forced to share this role with Frank and Cole. A half brother of Jesse and Frank, John Samuel, once told a reporter that “Frank planned and Jesse executed.” This was said years after Jesse’s death while Frank was still living, so the older James brother may have had a hand in shaping that assessment. Jesse’s many letters to the press show that he saw himself as a top leader of the gang.

  Standing six feet tall, Cole Younger may not have been the tallest gang member, but he was by far the most impressive in size. A powerful man with large hands, he weighed a good two hundred pounds, was nearly bald, and had a sandy mustache and chin whiskers. “He looks anything but a villain,” wrote one journalist, “but every feature and expression indicates caution, shrewdness, and a high order of intellect.” Cole could quote the Bible as well as Frank, and he was known to toss out a line or two of Byron. He was quite amiable, liked to talk, and could spin a damned good yarn.

  Jim Younger, something of the darling of the Younger clan, was an inch shorter than Cole and weighed a good thirty pounds less. He had dark hair, large eyes, and, according to one observer, “a changing, peculiar expression.” Cole once said that Jim was “either in the garret or way down in the cellar,” referring to his brother’s tremendous mood swings. “He was either as chipper as a bird or else he was very melancholy.”

  Bob Younger, the youngest of the three brothers (he was only twenty-two years old in 1876), was, by all accounts, the most handsome. He stood an impressive six feet, two inches tall with brawny arms and a thick neck. No one could miss his deep blue eyes, which had a “cold, searching look.” In addition, his heavy brow reminded one reporter of those that “phrenologists would give men of wonderful mathematical ability.” His face was clean shaven save for a neatly trimmed, sandy mustache. Bob had been too young to fight with his brothers in the Civil War, but the terrible ordeal had impacted his life just the same.

  “Circumstances sometimes make men what they are,” Bob once said. “If it had not been for the war, I might have been something, but as it is, I am what I am.”

  On a Kansas City street, on the evening of August 17, 1876, a young man on horseback rode up to a reporter of the Kansas City Times and handed him a letter. Without saying a word, the man turned his horse and rode away. The reporter unfolded the letter and read the dateline: Oak Grove, Kansas, August 14. Skipping quickly down the page to the signature—“J. W. James.”—the reporter realized that Jesse had written a direct response to the recent publication of Hobbs Kerry’s confession, and its naming of the Jameses and Youngers as accomplices in the Rocky Cut affair.

  “If there was only one side to be told,” Jesse wrote, “it would probably be believed by a good many people that Kerry has told the truth. But his so-called confession is a well-built pack of lies from beginning to end. I never heard of Hobbs Kerry, Charles Pitts and Wm. Chadwell until Kerry’s arrest. I can prove my innocence by eight good and well known men of Jackson County, and show conclusively that I was not at the train robbery. . . . Kerry knows that the Jameses and Youngers can’t be taken alive, and that is why he has put it on us.”

  The defiant taunting did not stop there. Only four days later Jesse wrote an even longer letter, again to the Times, a newspaper noted for its sympathy to the outlaws. While the letter contained a point-by-point rebuttal of Kerry’s account—calling him “a notorious liar and poltroon”—it also ranted against state and railroad officials, the leader of the Sedalia posse, and, of course, the Pinkertons.

  “If we (the Jameses and Youngers) had been granted full amnesty,” Jesse wrote, in an obvious appeal to his pro-Southern supporters, “I am sure we would of been at work, trying to be good, law-abiding citizens.”

  As to the express companies that continued to help bankroll the manhunt, the outlaw advised that they “give [their] extra money to the suffering poor and don’t let thieving Detectives beat you out of it.” This letter was datelined “Safe Retreat,” and there was little question now that Jesse and Frank and the Youngers were safe from capture. They “have disappeared as they always do,” the Times commented in another column, “leaving no trail, and they will not be heard from again till they have robbed another train or another bank in some remote locality.”

  THREE

  TIGERS ON THE LOOSE

  None but a very daring and a very cunning man can be a successful criminal nowadays.

  —WEEKLY SEDALIA TIMES, 1876

  They had been to Minnesota before, but they didn’t get there on the roads or rivers, or the train rails. They came on the wind, millions of them, darkening the sky and falling to earth like snowflakes in a storm. The biggest locust swarms hit in July and August. Someone said they’d seen one that was seventeen miles wide. Minnesota farmers couldn’t do anything but watch helplessly as their wheat, corn, oats, and barley were completely devoured. It was another bad summer in a string of bad summers. Over the past four years, ending in 1876, crop losses to grasshoppers totaled no less than $8 million.

  There was more bad news that summer. Some eight hundred miles to the west, on the banks of the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, General George Armstrong Custer and more than two hundred men of his vaunted Seventh Cavalry were wiped out by an overwhelming force of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors. The July 7 Winona Daily Republican said that Custer, a bona fide Civil War hero and experienced Indian fighter, “was either betrayed and led into an ambuscade by his Indian scouts, or he was guilty of inexcusable rashness in attacking a large body of savages strongly posted.” One thing this did mean: more bluecoats would be marching into Indian country.

  More depressing to most Americans were the effects of the Panic of 1873, which caused high unemployment, a downward spiral for crop prices, and the failure of thousands of businesses. And President U. S. Grant, whose floundering administration was littered with corrupt officials, was incapable of doing anything constructive.

  Yet amid all these hard times and bad news, the biggest birthday party in the nation’s history was taking place in Philadelphia. The Centennial International Exposition was many things: World’s Fair, gaudy architectural and artistic showpiece, but, most of all, a chest-thumping display of everything American. More than two hundred buildings showcased exhibits with countless mechanical wonders and inventions, not the least of which was the typewriter and the telephone. Fairgoers oohed and ahhed over steam locomotives, gleaming brass telescopes, ominous Gatling guns, a foot-powered drilling machine for dentists, and the latest lifesaving devices for seafarers.

  In one corner of the main building was a faux post office l
obby fabricated by the Yale Lock Manufacturing Company of Stamford, Connecticut. The elaborate exhibit featured the firm’s latest invention: a chronometer, or time lock, for bank safes and vaults. Mounted on the inside of a safe door, Yale’s patented lock with its two time mechanisms (which had to be periodically wound with a key) regulated the hour when a safe could be both unlocked and locked.

  Bankers would set the device to lock at the end of the business day and open the next morning. It was impossible to open the safe or vault until the chronometer reached the preset time. The time lock completely thwarted the dangerous tactic used by some robbers of showing up at a banker’s home in the middle of the night, rousting him from bed, dragging him off to the bank at gunpoint, and forcing him to open the safe. This method of robbery was known as “bulldozing.”

  By the end of 1876, nearly a thousand banks used the celebrated Yale chronometer lock. First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota, got its Yale time lock in late August. The Rice County Journal joked that the Northfield bank would be able to avoid “the annoyance of having burglars pull the cashier’s hair to make him open the safe.”

  The bank’s cashier was George M. Phillips, and on September 4 he boarded a train bound for Philadelphia, where he would tour the Yale exhibit and many others. The First National Bank’s bookkeeper, Joseph Lee Heywood, planned to take his wife to see the exposition upon Phillips’s return. Indeed, the Americans converged on Philadelphia that summer like the grasshopper swarms that struck Minnesota. Tens of thousands walked through the exposition gates daily. The railroads offered special trains and rates to those wanting to travel there.

  But while countless midwesterners sped eastward in the August heat, eight strapping and somewhat mysterious men boarded a train in Missouri that would take them north. They were bound for no exposition or fair, but it was to be a pleasure trip of sorts. The destination for these eight men, the infamous James-Younger gang, was the last place police and detectives would expect to find them.

  Minnesota was also the last place attorney Samuel Hardwicke expected to find the Missouri desperadoes. So much so that he was betting his life on it. Hardwicke had secretly played a singular role in organizing the disastrous raid on the James farm in January 1875, in which little Archie Samuel was mortally wounded and Zerelda maimed after an incendiary device tossed into the house exploded. Hardwicke was Allan Pinkerton’s right-hand man in Clay County. The forty-two-year-old Hardwicke had even gone with the Pinkerton men on their scorched-earth mission.

  “Above everything,” a seething Allan Pinkerton had instructed the attorney, “destroy the [James] house, blot it from the face of the earth.”

  It’s hard to figure out what drove the bookish Hardwicke to take on the James boys. He was born of pioneer stock—his father had been a California argonaut and his uncle a famous Santa Fe trader—but Hardwicke was content to practice the law and start a family in his native Clay County, where he put together one of the region’s finest private libraries. A pro-Union Democrat, he was, for the most part, quiet and unassuming, though he could sometimes exhibit a “nervous temperament.”

  Hardwicke’s alliance with Allan Pinkerton was nothing short of courageous; some would say a fool’s errand. His involvement in a plan to destroy a home he knew housed innocent family members, however, made him the worst sort of vigilante. And with the tragic death of Archie Samuel, Hardwicke and the Pinkertons became murderers. Jesse and Frank had killed men, yes, but they had never killed a child.

  Just seven days after the raid, the Chicago Tribune ran a story naming Hardwicke as a Pinkerton operative. Missouri papers copied the story, and Hardwicke had to pack up his family and move from his rural farmstead to quarters on Liberty’s town square. The attorney was in such a hurry to get into town he paid the former tenant a month’s rent to move out.

  Hardwicke sent two letters to Jesse via Jesse’s friend, newspaperman John Newman Edwards. Hardwicke admitted that he had corresponded with Allan Pinkerton, but it was only as Pinkerton’s local attorney. Hardwicke also reached out to Zerelda Samuel, promising to come out to see her as soon as court was out of session.

  An enraged Jesse James would have none of this. His own sources in Clay County had told him all he needed to know about Sam Hardwicke. On March 23, as a grand jury in Liberty heard testimony on the Pinkerton raid, Jesse wrote his stepfather, Dr. Samuel: “They [There] can not be a doubt but Hardwicke is the instigator of the brutal murder and he knows every mane [man] that was there & I am convinced Hardwick[e] was with the murder[er]s when poor little Archie was so cruelly murdered.”

  Jesse sent Dr. Samuel the two letters he had received from the attorney and instructed his stepfather to present them to the grand jury. “D[o] have this horrible vlian [villain] thoroughly investigated,” he wrote. “For I want the Law to take its course and spair Clay Co[unty] of a mob that will be bloody and desperate. I have pledged my self to let the law take its course but my friends will be forced to mob the murder[er]s of poor Archie if the grand Jury don[’t] have the guilty party indicted. They [There] cannot be a doubt but H[ardwicke] is guilty. . . . Strain every nerve to have the midnight assassins punished.”

  Hardwicke did testify before the grand jury, but, in the end, he was not one of the men indicted. Neither was the Samuels’ closest neighbor, Daniel Askew, who had also been working with the Pinkertons. For weeks prior to the attack, Askew had boarded one of Pinkerton’s detectives, passing the man off as a hired hand. Jesse figured that out, too.

  At approximately 7:30 P.M. on Monday, April 12, Jesse and Clell Miller surprised Dan Askew at his front gate, toting a bucket of spring water. Askew realized it was too late to run, and he stared at the two revolvers pointed at his face while slowly setting down his pail. Quiet words were exchanged. Perhaps Askew begged for his life, but as he looked into Jesse’s eyes, he saw the anger and the finality. Three pistol shots in rapid succession shattered the night’s silence, and Askew collapsed to the ground, blood bubbling out of three bullet holes in his skull.

  Askew’s murder sent chills through Clay County and much of western Missouri. Everyone knew it was a revenge killing. “There is a tiger loose in Clay County,” commented the Kansas City Times, “and no man can say who will be the next victim.” It was not that hard to guess, though. One newspaper named five men who had supposedly been warned that they were next to follow Askew to an early grave.

  Sam Hardwicke was one of the five, but he had known for a long time he was at the top of Jesse’s list, which was why he had moved into town. But he still had to be on the lookout. The James boys were bold and ruthless, and they just might ride straight into the square one day and gun him down. Hardwicke armed himself, but as the weeks and months passed, he and his family felt like they were living in a prison.

  Finally, in May 1876, Hardwicke and family hurried to the train station under cover of night. As the locomotive hissed and their train lurched forward, Hardwicke breathed a sigh of relief. Within forty-eight hours, they would safely arrive at their new home: St. Paul, Minnesota, far from the stomping grounds of the James brothers.

  Three months after Sam Hardwicke fled Missouri, most, if not all, of the James-Younger gang got together to discuss their future plans. Despite the gang’s incredible ability to stay one step ahead of the authorities after each bank or train robbery, their former gang member Hobbs Kerry, who ratted out so many of them, had made it much hotter for the boys than usual. Private detectives, police officers, and citizen posses traipsed all over western Missouri, southeast Kansas, and even northeast Texas. Kerry sat alone in a jail in Boonville, Missouri, where he received letters from his old pals. Each one had a cross of blood at the head and told Kerry he would be a dead man the minute he got out of prison. In the meantime, the James-Younger gang needed a change of scenery.

  Jesse told the boys they should go to Minnesota. Everyone knew this involved a personal vendetta, but Jesse likely argued that the gang would have freedom of movement in Minnesota. The gang ha
d never before operated that far north and no one would suspect they were who they were. And no one there would be on the lookout for them. Plus, there were the bustling, wide open towns of Minneapolis and St. Paul with their brothels and casinos and places where the boys could have a damn good time spending their Rocky Cut loot.

  Minnesota also offered lots of fat banks, many of them easy marks, with the potential for a big haul from a Northern bank. Additionally, a bank robbery conducted with the coolness and daring with which they were so often associated—their signature, so to speak—would likely pull the detectives and police away from their favorite hideouts in Missouri.

  And then there was Sam Hardwicke. Jesse’s brilliant blue eyes seemed to catch on fire when he spoke his name. Hardwicke had evidently believed he was so safe he could write a letter to the Liberty Tribune and give his St. Paul address. That was helpful for Jesse, who had every intention of looking up the murderer of little Archie and sending him to hell.

  Bob Younger and Jesse were close, so Bob was all for Jesse’s plan. He relished the idea of a strike against the North—it was bold and exciting—and the chance to empty a bank vault of thousands of dollars was always appealing. Cole, though, argued against the plan. He later said he had a “terrible urge” not to make the Minnesota trip, which made a wonderful tale for newspaper reporters. Cole did have an urge; however, that urge was to disagree with anything Jesse suggested.

  Jim Younger, who had been summoned from California to join in the expedition, bringing the gang back up to eight men, also was not keen on the idea, or at least that is what he claimed afterward. Cole would say that his opposition to the northern jaunt was “overruled,” suggesting that he was bound by the decision of the gang. Perhaps so, but Cole always seemed to do what Cole wanted to do. If anything, Cole and Jim were not about to let their little brother go off without them: “kinsfolk are born to share adversity.”